The Charm Offensive(68)

“What are you doing?”

“Going to the hotel gym,” Charlie grunts as he shoves his feet into his sneakers. He doesn’t bother tying them. He needs to get the hell out of this room before Dev sees him cry.

“It’s the middle of the night.”

“Then I’ll go for a run.”

“Wait!” Dev shouts as Charlie barrels out of the room. “We’re in the middle of a conversation.”

“I think the conversation is over.”

Charlie pushes past Jules and Parisa, who are standing in the kitchen eating a midnight snack, pretending they haven’t been listening to this entire argument.

“Charlie, stop!”

Charlie doesn’t stop. He’s out the door, down the hall, taking the stairs to the ground floor two at a time.

“Charlie.”

Dev reaches for his shoulder, and Charlie wheels around. He’s angry and he’s tired and he’s so damn heartbroken he doesn’t know what to do with himself except exercise away this horrible knot in his chest.

“You know what, Dev,” he says, and he fails in his chief mission of not crying in front of him. “For someone who claims to love love, you’re really good at pushing it away.”

Then he turns and heads down the last flight of steps, knowing Dev isn’t going to follow.





Dev


Charlie takes the last few steps two at a time, pushes through the door at the end of the stairwell, and vanishes. He’s gone, and there is something about the whoosh and click of a closing industrial-strength door that feels final. It feels like twenty-four days, gone in an instant.

A creeping numbness starts in his fingertips. It claims his hands, his forearms, his elbows, until he’s standing in a stairwell unsure of how to move. What did he do?

He was so angry with Charlie for screwing up the scene with Megan and Delilah, and still, Charlie was so utterly Charlie. Earnest and vulnerable and sweet. He took Dev’s face in his hands and told him he cared, and Dev took Charlie’s affection and smashed it at their feet.

For someone who claims to love love, you’re really good at pushing it away.

But Charlie could never love him. Charlie’s story ends with a Final Tiara, and maybe it’s better he realizes that now and not in twenty-four days. Charlie unburdened his whole self to Dev, unwrapped himself like a present, gave himself away. Dev would have to be stupid to think that means he gets to keep him.

Dev never should’ve started this thing. He never should’ve let Charlie start this thing.

Dev shoves open the door to their hotel suite. He’s not sure how he got back here. His brain is trying to do the breaststroke under twenty feet of water. Jules and Parisa are both standing in the kitchen. It’s two in the morning, and they still haven’t changed from today’s Group Quest at Kirstenbosch. Parisa is wearing a bright yellow caftan that falls over her curves like honey, Jules in her corduroy shorts and a homemade Stormpilot T-shirt, Finn and Poe’s screen-printed faces in a giant puff-paint heart. They’re both wearing expressions his water brain can’t understand.

“I’ll go after mine,” Parisa says. “You stay with yours.”

Parisa floats out of the room, and Dev is somehow in his bed now. Their bed. The bed where Charlie opens up for him every night.

“Dev?” Jules asks, cautious. “What happened?”

She obviously knows. She heard them fighting.

He buries himself in blankets that smell like oatmeal body wash and tries very hard not to cry. “Go away, Jules.”

He can feel the mattress shift slightly under her weight. “Come on. Talk to me.”

He cocoons himself deeper into the bed, and he doesn’t think about Munich, when Charlie grabbed onto the blankets and refused to let go. Jules goes with a different approach. She somehow weasels her way into the blankets, too, and slides down into the middle of the bed with him. “Dev, please. I care about you,” she whispers into their blanket fort. He feels those words gather in the back of his throat like a sob. “Tell me what happened.”

“You shouldn’t care about me. I’m a monster.”

“No, you’re not.”

Little light makes it through the hotel comforter, and he can only see the outline of her face, not her actual expression, when he says, “I’m sleeping with him, Jules.”

For a second, she’s quiet, a foot in front of him, their bodies angled like parentheses. “Am I supposed to be surprised you’re having sex with the man who literally shares your bed?”

He curls himself into a tighter ball. “Jules—”

“Dev.” Her hand reaches out for something in the dark and finds his throat. It’s still comforting. “I know you and Charlie are hooking up. I’ve known since you first kissed in New Orleans. I mean, Parisa and I easily could’ve shared the king-size bed, Dev.”

He groans into the mattress. “Why did you let me do this? I’m ruining everything!”

“First of all, I did not let you. You’re an adult. And second, what are you ruining?”

“Um, the show. That we work for. Where we help hot people find love with someone of equal hotness.”

“Honestly, after tonight, fuck the show.”

“I can’t.” This conversation is somehow so much easier to have muffled by starched sheets. “You don’t understand. The Delilah and Megan thing doesn’t matter. It’s a distraction from the love, which is what he wants. Charlie wants a happily ever after, and my horny ass is destroying his chance to have it!”